Progress is making new mistakes, not repeating old mistakes. I fear the Democrats may be about to repeat an old mistake in the upcoming election.
The 2016 election was the Democrat’s to lose, and they managed to lose it. Partly it was because they picked a weak and flawed candidate in Hillary, and partly it was because they didn’t have a very compelling message, but mainly it was because they seriously underestimated (a) the anger of a large portion of the voters, including especially among what should have been their base, the middle American working classes, and (b) Trump’s effectiveness at appealing to that anger. Hillary’s contemptuous and elitist dismissal of middle Americans as “deplorables” was probably the last nail in the 2016 coffin for the Democrats.
A competent Democratic party would have done a serious post-loss assessment, realized that they needed to reshape their message to broaden their appeal beyond the wealthy, college-educated coastal elites to regain at least some of the working-class base in middle America. Did they do that? Not that I can see. Instead of moving more to the center to improve their appeal to patriotic, religious traditionalists the party went further left and has been pushing policies that appeal to the secular elite, not the working class. Perhaps that was inevitable, since so many of the Democratic leaders these days are themselves part of the wealthy secular elite.
In finally coalescing behind Joe Biden, a moderate Democrat, the party did at least avoid the suicidal option of going to the extreme left with Bernie Sanders. But Biden is a fairly weak candidate, with lots of baggage. The assumption, apparently widely held among Democrats, that he can win simply because he is not Trump is, I think, naïve. Trump may be incompetent at governing, but he is not incompetent at marketing; in fact he is very, very good at marketing, and Democrats underestimate him at their peril, as 2016 showed.
Part of the problem is that both political parties are in serious disarray, undergoing the sort of major reshuffling and realignment that occurs every few decades. The Democrats are in the middle of a bitter existential battle between the moderates and the more extreme left, and the Republicans seem not to know what they stand for anymore. That means that neither party at the moment has the sort of experienced, consistent and competent leadership that it would have in more normal times, nor the sort of coherent message that such leadership would provide.
The polls suggest that this election is still Biden’s to lose. FiveThirtyEight, the most reliable polling site, gives Biden a 70% chance of winning at the moment, but that is just about what they predicted for Hillary at the same point in the 2016 election. Betting odds, which are usually a fairly good predictor, have the two much closer. The composite betting odds compiled by FiveThirtyEight are down to Biden 50.9 vs Trump 48.6 as of today - essentially a tie. Democrats need to temper their confidence and up their game, and not necessarily believe all the positive spin that the mostly liberal media is feeding them.
They have not addressed their glaring mistake in 2016 of ignoring the concerns of the working classes, and many of those people are even more distressed now, out of work because of COVIID. And Democratic hesitancy to deal effectively with, or even condemn, the destructive riots and looting in some of our cities over the past few weeks, or the rising crime rates, is not going to help them.
There is a certain deja vu feel to this election. Democrats may be about to make the same mistake that they made in 2016.
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